The only good Lawyer

Mantle gives you six weeks’ worth of rent, all in cash at the same time.”
    “Right. What he owed me, plus the advance.”
    “Just before Spaeth accuses you of stealing his revolver.”
    “I don’t know what kind of gun it was.”
    “You don’t?”
    “Hell, no.”
    “You never saw it?”
    A new cocking of the head. “I never even knew the fucking thing existed, eh? When Spaeth come to rent from me, I told him the house rule was ‘no guns.’ Then, after he’s lived here for a while, the asshole claims I went into his room and stole the thing. Says he’s moving out to an apartment three blocks over because of that.”
    The version Spaeth told me at the Nashua Street jail. Which might be just a good setup by him for why Woodrow Gant could have been killed by a gun with Spaeth’s prints on its shells.
    But then why wouldn’t the guy just have taken the revolver with him from the crime scene and pitched the thing where it wouldn’t be found and linked with the shooting?
    Dufresne gave me a new angle of his head. “Eh, you okay?”
    “Sorry.” I moved around the room, more to think than to look. “You said you helped Mantle up here last week on Monday or Tuesday.”
    “Right.”
    “When did you see him last?”
    “Last?”
    “Yes.”
    Dufresne stared at the hardwood floor. “I think that was it.”
    I stopped. “You haven’t seen Mantle for a full week?”
    “Yeah, but that’s not so unusual, you know. I mean, the guy does his carpentry, he’s got to be on the job by seven in the a.m. sometimes.”
    “I thought you said he hadn’t been working for the last month?”
    “Yeah, but I don’t really know that. Besides, the guys here drift in and out at all hours. I try to get them to lock the front door, but they’re not exactly the most responsible people on God’s earth, eh?”
    “How long has Mantle lived here?”
    “Two, three years. More like three.”
    “He ever pay you in advance before?”
    “Once. His uncle died, left him some kind of inheritance.”
    “But other than that...”
    “The Mick’s strictly hand-to-mouth.”
    Adding things up, I said, “You think he might have gotten the advance money this time by stealing Spaeth’s gun and selling it?”
    “No.” Dufresne shook his head. “No, the Mick’s got his faults, but he’s no thief. And he’s loyal, too.”
    “Loyal?”
    “He wouldn’t screw a friend, even just a drinking buddy like your Spaeth.”
    “They drink here?”
    “Here and around here. Couple of bars up Broadway, and another on L Street toward the beach.”
    “These places have names?”
    A shrug. “Not that matter.”
    Growing up in Southie, I knew what he meant. “Well, thanks for your help.”
    As I moved into the hall, Dufresne said, “It’s a good rule, eh?”
    I stopped and looked back at him. “What is?”
    “My thing about guns. Can’t have them in the house, not with these losers.”
    “Mr. Dufresne—”
    “My mother, she was part Indian, where those cheekbones came from? She always said her grandma on the tribe side told her, ‘Firewater and guns, they don’t mix.’ ”
    One of the honking laughs before Vincennes Dufresne took out his master key and locked Michael Mantle’s door.

Chapter 4

    T he boston homicide Unit is on D Street in Southie, a block off West Broadway. It has the second floor of the old District 6 police station, a two-story building of bricks soot-darkened to that dingy brown of dried blood. The windows show boxy air conditioners and green trim around them. White stones embedded in the brick arc above the main entrance, like the doorway to a chapel. However, the Stars and Stripes flaps overhead, a separate black-and-white pennant remembering POW’s and MIA’s just below the flag they were lost fighting for.
    I stopped at the battered counter on the first floor and asked a woman from Warrants for Lieutenant Robert Murphy.
    Hiking a thumb over her shoulder; she said, “I think he’s in the back, fuming some relic.”
    The department had let the Homicide Unit turn a portion of the old station’s garage area into a fuming tent for spotting latents on vehicles suspected of being involved in homicides. Robert Murphy was standing safely away from two men working near the wooden frame covered with clear plastic, a low-slung Pontiac from the seventies getting the treatment inside.
    About six feet and barrel-chested, Murphy was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and geometric tie, the gold wedding band on his left